Off the Bookshelf

Nightmare Town

Knopf, 432 pp., $25

It’s the language, stupid. Nightmare Town collects 20 long-unavailable short stories from Dashiell Hammett, an icon of 20th-century literature whose influence will continue to be felt well into the 21st. With a handful of novels and a few dozen short stories, Hammett invented a totally new idiom — American hard-boiled crime fiction — and he did it with clever, compact, hard-hitting use of the English language — language that evoked both a specific time and place and was so classic and elemental it seemed both preordained and timeless. Hammett, who tossed off lines like “Emotions are a nuisance during business hours,” like he was flicking the ash of his cigarette, could set a tone just as effortlessly. He didn’t just invent the hard-boiled crime fiction genre, he anticipated and spawned much of what we now know as film noir, creating indelible characters such as Sam Spade (Bogart in The Maltese Falcon) and the less handsome, nameless Continental Op (truer to Hammett’s own experience as a Pinkerton detective). From Hammett’s work flowed much of the peculiarly American existential vernacular that pulsed from World War I onward through the golden age of film noir: the mean streets scenarios and homicide blondes, the side-of-mouth patter, and the sadistic goons. And it all started with Hammett’s short fiction, which debuted in the early Twenties in the pulp magazine Black Mask. Later, with that lovable and shallow and self-deprecating party animal detective team, Nick and Nora Charles, Hammett moved both backward and forward, poking fun of everything he’d done before, and at his own sudden superstardom as well. Of special interest to Hammett aficionados, this collection includes all three original Continental Op short stories, as well as a very different 50-page original treatment of the Thin Man story.

As is well-known, Hammett stopped writing prose in early 1934, having produced all his short fiction and novels (The Big Knockover, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, and The Thin Man, to name a few classics) in just 12 years. He died in 1961 of lung cancer, broke but unbowed, having pissed away millions on the high life, having fought in both world wars, and told Senator McCarthy’s commie/witch-hunting committee to go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut (and served a stint in jail because of it). These days, most documentaries and movies seize upon the tragic arc of Hammett’s life, which started out with such a bang and then, tragically, seemingly became a waste for the next half of his life. Undeniably, there’s a lot of sadness in that story, but look at what he did in those 12 years! For that kind of legacy, most writers would gladly sell their souls — or the second half of their lives, no less.

This article appears in February 18 • 2000.